Is Radiohead the latest band to go open source?

Radiohead's new single, House of Cards, features a promotional video that has been "filmed" without the use of a camera or conventional lighting. Instead the band has used two advanced visualisation techniques to produce an assembly of computer renderings in real time.

Radiohead has employed a scanning system, called Geometric Informatics, that produces structured light to capture three-dimensional images in close-up. Then, for some atmospheric location shots, an advanced Velodyne Lidar system, which uses multiple lasers to capture large environments, has been used to create scenes of suburban Los Angeles. The system uses 64 lasers rotating in 360 degrees at a rate of 900 times per minute.

The live action promo was created entirely with visualisations of that data. But what is most interesting is the way that Radiohead has decided to "open source" the project, allowing anyone to use the data to produce their own interpretation of the promo.

Furthermore, it has combined with Google to release the data (although not the music) using a Creative Commons licence, which you can download from the Google Code site.

Google has also provided a handy visualiser to help you play around with the code, although, theoretically at least, you should be able to mashup the data on a range of video editing applications, including QuickTime Pro and the open-source VirtualDub. You should be able to use iMovie on the iPhone as well.

Once you've messed around with it, there's a YouTube group for you to share. Early reports from the group, which launched on Monday, indicate that the data visualisation is tricky. Several users reported that the visualisation failed to work or was distorted. The less technically inclined can make do with a nifty desktop application that allows you to play around with a visualisation of Thom Yorke's head.

The promo's director, James Frost, has said that: "In a weird way [the project] is a direct reflection of where we are in society. Everything is [computer] data. Everything around us is data-driven in some shape or form. We are so reliant on it that it seems like our lives are digital." The end result is memorable video, full of what looks like millions of points of light that seem to move as if the data were alive.

Radiohead is not the first band to offer an open-source video. Last year Björk allowed her fans to remix her video for her single Innocence. Radiohead's House of Cards is taken from the latest Radiohead album, In Rainbows, which pioneered a pay-what-you-please sales strategy in the first few weeks of its release.

As one wag on the internet has pointed out, the visualisation will be free for a couple of months. And then you have to pay for it.